Ludwig says he received a “baby cease and desist” letter from Nintendo over his Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament, the Ludwig Ahgren Championship Series 5.
In a YouTube video posted on Oct. 26, Ludwig revealed that Nintendo came after him for wanting to use a mod to remove the transformation of Pokémon Stadium, which would make the stage a little more fair.
The aforementioned stage’s transformations, according to Ludwig, can be more beneficial to a set of characters and not so much for other characters. Obviously, this can shift the match’s momentum to the losing player if their character benefits more from it, who can then clutch out the win.
As such, Ludwig wanted to use this mod to take the hazards off the stage, but Nintendo had other ideas and sent a letter making it clear that they would not allow this.
Of course, it was a Pokémon Stadium transition that actually determined the eventual winner of LACS 5. In a Game 5 set between Leffen and Cody Schwab, Cody was winning by a large margin and only needed a couple more hits to win the game.
However, when the stage transformed, this gave Leffen the opportunity to use a wall in the middle of the stage to combo Cody and win the tournament because of it.
Now, you can say that Leffen used the stage to his advantage and you’d be right, but considering Smash Ultimate has the option to remove hazards, it’s unfair for Melee players to not be able to do that.
Ludwig mentioned that he wanted to talk about this incident because of a recent development regarding Nintendo and tournaments. Nintendo recently released a set of guidelines for each region’s Smash tournaments and the guidelines included a prohibition on modifying the game which is why Ludwig received the cease and desist letter during LACS 5.
